Not compatible
by Maid Malcolm
Summary: There's one way to crash Blue Beetle's mode. But it involves a Reach Infiltrator and a Lord of Order sharing rather close quarters.


Nightwing and Dr Fate stared down at the unconscious teenager at their feet. Nightwing started to bend down. "HE IS ALIVE," Fate assured him.

Seconds later, Bart was at their side. They stood, motionless, for several awkward moments.

"So… now what?" Bart eventually asked.

"It's your mission," Nightwing countered. "You tell me."

"Nono, MY mission was supposed to stop it from ever getting this far. If I knew how to take a Beetle off-mode I would've done it ages ago."

"THIS MECHANICAL SYMBIOTE IS VULNERABLE TO MYSTIC ENERGY," Fate rumbled. "IT MAY BE POSSIBLE TO DAMAGE IT BEYOND REPAIR."

"Without killing Blue?"

"POSSIBLY."

"'Possibly'? Possibly isn't good enough. Can't you somehow… direct the energy to avoid anything connected to Blue?"

Fate didn't answer. He stood, motionless. Nightwing stepped in front of him and peered into Zatara's wide, blank eyes. "Doctor Fate? Nabu? Are you alright?"

"YES. I BELIEVE THAT IT MAY BE POSSIBLE TO HELP YOUR FRIEND, BUT I WILL BE… INDISPOSED FOR SOME TIME."

Nightwing glanced at the door. They were alone for the moment, but enemies could show up unexpectedly. They couldn't move Jaime without risking him waking up, and then they could lose him forever. Whatever had to happen, had to happen fast. "How long?"

"POSSIBLY SEVERAL MINUTES. PROBABLY SEVERAL HOURS."

"We'll protect you," Bart promised. "However long it takes."

Fate nodded. "THEN I SHALL BEGIN IMMEDIATELY. DO NOT INTERFERE." He knelt next to Jaime's unconscious form, reached up, and slowly lifted the helmet from Zatara's head.

"Giovanni!" Nightwing knelt next to him. "Are you okay? What's happening?"

Giovanni stared at him uncomprehendingly for several seconds. Then his expression softened. "Robin. Nightwing. I almost did not recognise you. I… stopped watching so much, somewhere along the way."

"Are you alright?"

"There is no time for that now. We have work to do." He looked from the helmet in his hands to Jaime, and sighed. "This should never be done without the consent of the receiving party. And I am at loath to do it to a child at all. But temporarily, in the context of medical treatment… I understand the necessity. And I did give my word." Giovanni slid the helmet over Jaime's head and carefully lined up the eye holes. "Nekawa!"

Jaime's eyes shot open. Then he started seizing.

"Blue!" Bart zipped to his side, but Nightwing pushed him away.

"Don't try to hold him down, you might hurt him or yourself. We need to make sure there's nothing he could hit or cut himself on."

"Well, duh. You think I've never dealt with a seizure before? It's something he has to crash himself. I'm not gonna freak out and get someone hurt."

Nightwing blinked at him. Of course Bart had done first aid, but… "When did you deal with – "

"Do you really want to know the answer to that question?" Bart slipped his fingers under the edge of the Helmet, protecting Jaime's shoulders with a cushion of his own flesh.

"No, I probably don't. I'm going to keep watch. Don't – "

"Don't take the helmet off, yeah, I know. Argh!" Bart pulled back as metal arms shot from the Scarab to grip Jaime's shoulders. Somebody without superspeed would've been at risk of having their hands trapped. "What's going on in there?!"

* * *

- NOT COMPATIBLE. -

Blue Beetle's systems were analysing. Or attempting to. He quickly stopped attempting to scan the invader directly as doing so just returned a stream of gibberish – it was mystic, or interdimensional, or alien, or some other thing that the systems couldn't account for. Instead he tried to chart its path of destruction, what was missing, where it was going. But without further data, it was impossible to chart accurately; the invader moved almost as fast as blue beetle thought (nothing humanlike; nothing humanlike could do that), and the border between invader and meat wasn't obvious until he hit gibberish. A significant portion of his computational power was tied up in sifting real information from read and translation error. Blue Beetle could do little but try to clean up the damage left in the invader's wake.

And he was losing.

The motor cortex was the first thing to fail. Blue Beetle attempted to fight for control but quickly realised that his nervous system could be irreparably damaged, so he powered down the Scarab systems within and concentrated on keeping the meat alive via more roundabout routes. Seizing; no time to deal with that. But he couldn't breathe through the seizures; used Scarab systems to artificially oxygenate blood.

Blue's heart stopped. He reset it. His teeth clenched tight enough to crack; nonvital systems, he ignored them. And the energy, the foreign, disordered, killing energy, snaked its way through meat and metal alike, shocking, separating.

When his heart failed the second time, he knew that he wasn't going to keep up.

The invader paused, and Blue Beetle had a chance to restart his heart and address other immediate system failures. But he had no time or power left for anything else. The damage was too severe.

It paused, for one brief moment.

And then it killed him.

* * *

Nabu did not like killing.

The question of whether an interdimensional personification of cosmic intent could 'like' anything was a difficult and heavily semantic one, but if he had to phrase his inclinations in simple human terms, he would claim not to like killing.

Dr Fate was an agent of balance. Lord of Order was accurate enough, but easily led to misconception; humans so often thought of order as rigid, confined. If he had the opportunity to rename himself in light of his knowledge of human cultures, he would probably use the term Lord of Harmony. There was a flow to all things, a balance; it was this that he safeguarded.

Nabu would probably not have considered himself a superhero had he not fallen in with superheroes whose goals so often aligned his. But it was in his nature to dislike pain and death. Pain was a sign of system failure, an alert that something was wrong, unbalanced. Death was a system collapse, where the flow of energy and information was disrupted to such a degree that it could no longer regain balance. And yet, small cycles of energy were formed and collapsed all the time as part of larger ones. The tree died to feed the mushroom. The mushroom died to feed the ants. Cycles of energy within organisms collapsed to feed into ecosystems, ecosystems collapsed to feed into larger ones on an evolutionary timescale. Eventually, the universe itself would die, and its energy would feed others.

Nabu understood the necessary role that this disharmony, that "chaos", played in events. He knew that order and chaos were intertwined and symbiotic and, in many cases, the same thing from two perspectives. Life and change and time itself were born from their dance. But from a bent tree to an old woman's bent back, he did not like the other half of the equation. Doing so was not in his nature.

So he disliked killing. He disliked small system collapses although he knew they made larger ones stable. And he very much disliked chasing a mechanical entity through the body of its fleshy symbiote, destroying the near-perfect harmony of their union and wreaking havoc on their individual internal systems, leaving the mechanical half to scramble to restore order and keep them both alive.

But the role of destroyer that he played was good for one thing; it instinctively kept him from taking over completely, from wresting Jaime's consciousness into the helmet and pouring his power throughout the boy's body, burning out his symbiote and killing him. No… looking at Jaime's systems told him that that was not going to work, not if he wanted Jaime alive.

If he must disrupt the symbiotes, he would prefer to… remove one system from the other, take it to a location where they could no longer interfere with each other. But their interconnectedness and inherent vulnerability to his magic made that impossible. There was no choice. He must salvage what he could.

Nabu focused his mind. He saw the patterns of cause and effect and traced them backwards to see what Jaime and the Scarab were like in the past. He took note of specific, previously damaged systems.

Then, with small, careful arcs of mystical power, he reached through Jaime's body into the Scarab, and broke those systems.

* * *

"He's, uh… he's stopped seizing. For now."

Nightwing checked his watch. Two hours. "How is he?"

"Breathing. Steady pulse. I think he's asleep." Bart couldn't help but grin.

"We are not out of the woods yet," Zatara warned them. "When he… and Nabu… awaken, then we shall see."

* * *

- Immediate vital systems normal. Short-term vital systems under repair. No irreparable biological damage. –

- Significant damage to Scarab. Damage to Scarab's repair systems. Repair impossible.-

- Host-Scarab interface destroyed. Repair impossible. One-way communication still in effect.-

- Jaime. Jaime Reyes. –

No response. He was alive, his systems indicated consciousness… but no movement? The Scarab tried to move an arm. The effort burned.

"HE IS WITH ME, LITTLE ROBOT," Jaime's mouth said in a deep, echoing voice.

Even trying to sense Jaime's movement hurt. –Who are you?-

Jaime's eyes opened. The new resident glanced from the Impulse, to the Nightwing, to a face that the Scarab only knew from Team and League files.

- You are the Nabu. The spirit. –

"SPIRIT? I SUPPOSE THAT IS ACCURATE ENOUGH." Nabu stood and, sending a slight sting rippling through the Scarab's systems, flew away, paying no attention to the protesting heroes he left behind. "AND YOU SHOULD NOW BE FREE FROM REACH CONTROL."

- You were the force that attacked us.-

"YES."

The Scarab's first instinct was to attack the invader, but it knew enough to calculate that it stood little chance against the Lord of Order. Retreat was impossible. The only possible avenue of advancement was negotiation, with no bargaining chips.

That was usually where Jaime excelled. Possibly that was why the Nabu had separated them.

- Was your goal to free us from Reach control?-

"YES."

- Gratitude. Now leave. –

"I CANNOT, AT THIS TIME."

- Why not? –

"IT WILL BE FASTER TO EXPLAIN TO EVERYBODY AT ONCE." Nabu flew them back down, to be immediately swamped by heroes. Bart grabbed Jaime's shoulders and physically shook him.

"Is he okay in there? What's going on?"

"You promised!" Giovanni insisted, reaching up as if to grab the helmet and wrest it away but seeming to change his mind. "You swore that you would free the boy as soon as the task was done! I would not have agreed to help otherwise."

"AND I SHALL. BUT TO RELEASE HIM NOW WOULD BE DANGEROUS."

Nightwing, maintaining a distance of a couple of arm-lengths, narrowed his eyes. "Dangerous how?"

"THIS MECHANICAL SYMBIOTE IS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY VULNERABLE TO MY POWER."

"Well, yeah, that's kinda the point, isn't it?" Bart frowned and let him go. "Wait, 'is'? It's dead, isn't it? You killed it?"

"NO. EVEN IF THAT WERE POSSIBLE TO DO WITHOUT DESTROYING THE HOST, I AM… HESITANT TO CAUSE UNNECESSARY DESTRUCTION. I HAVE RETURNED IT TO AN APPROXIMATION OF ITS ORIGINAL DAMAGED STATE."

"You crippled it," Nightwing clarified.

"YES."

"Permanently?" Bart asked.

"YES."

"I don't know, that still seems…"

Nightwing put a calming hand on Bart's shoulder. "The Scarab never showed any inclination to betray us before being put on mode. There is no reason to think that it will this time either."

- And with that in mind, Nabu, why can you not free us?-

"THIS BOY'S BODY IS CURRENTLY… DELICATE. ONLY MY POWER IS KEEPING HIM STABLE. THIS MECHANICAL SYMBIOTE COULD HEAL HIM, BUT IT IS WEAKENED BY MY POWER… WERE I TO LEAVE, WE WOULD HAVE NO GUARANTEE THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD RECOVER IN TIME TO SAVE HIS LIFE."

"Can't we put him on life support?"

"POSSIBLY. BUT HIS SURVIVAL WOULD NOT BE GUARANTEED."

"Not guaranteed is not good enough. We're here to crash modes, not lives."

- What do you suggest?-

"I WILL REMAIN UNTIL HE HAS RECOVERED FROM THE STRAIN. A WEEK, PERHAPS."

"Nabu, I know from personal experience that your power is… draining."

"THEN I MUST ENDEAVOUR TO USE AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE, LEST SUCH A DRAIN MAKE A LONGER STAY NECESSARY."

- This is a trick. You just want Jaime to yourself. –

"YOU BELIEVE I WOULD ORCHESTRATE SUCH A DECEPTION IN ORDER TO LEAVE MY EXTREMELY MAGICALLY GIFTED HOST AND ETERNALLY FIGHT WITH AN INCOMPATIBLE SYMBIOTE FOR CONTROL OVER A NONCONSENTING HUMAN BOY WITH NO MAGICAL AFFINITY?"

Bart, Giovannni and Nightwing realised that Nabu seemed to have forgotten about them, and silently watched as he muttered to himself in his booming, eternal voice. "LITTLE ROBOT, I AM IN CONTROL, I HAVE NO NEED TO DECEIVE… DESTROY THE HELMET? WITHOUT DESTROYING YOUR HOST'S HEAD? NO, WE DO NOT NEED TO 'ELIMINATE THE WITNESSES'…"

"You know how Jaime used to talk to his Scarab sometimes?" Nightwing asked.

"It's always a bit unnerving, huh?" Bart replied.

Nightwing nodded. "This… this is a thousand times worse."


End file.
